I have the honor of speaking at the Big Design conference on September 5, which is a Dallas-hosted conference featuring interface designers, content strategist, usability experts and developers that has emerged as a leading UX/UI industry event. The two-day conference brings together 70 speakers, and nearly 1,000 interface designers, content strategists, usability experts, and developers with the mission to inspire and develop their skills. From my perspective, speaking at Big Design is a definite point of pride representing Sabre’s enthusiasm for embracing modern technology and sharing best practices with the design and development community.

My talk is entitled “What’s Before Mobile First?” That simple question opens up a great number of answers. We all know there’s an increasing trend towards mobile. It’s almost not worth asking ourselves “Is mobile important? Should our websites support handhelds?” The answer is almost always yes. It certainly is yes for me given my job at Sabre as a product engineer building TripCase. This project is made up of a mobile website at www.tripcase.com and native apps for iOS and Android.

In my job, I’m interested in what happens after my business team says “yes” to mobile. How do we reasonably ensure our designs and code work on all of the many phones and tablets running iOS and Android? During my presentation I’ll deliver a series of nut-and-bolts tactics for hammering mobile website design into shape. Some of the things I’ll review include:

How can you tease knowledge from Google Analytics data?

What hands-on tools help you find and fix website glitches on iOS and Android browsers?

Where can you find performance monitors seeing how fast your websites run?

Contributing best practices and practical techniques back to the designer and developer community is a quality we foster in our engineering culture at Sabre. Leading with forward-thinking technology isn’t enough to satisfy us. We’re only happy when we’re improving the user experience and solving real world problems for our customers. For me as a speaker, it means teaching my audience everything I know hoping to make them better at what they do. Of course my dream is that they build on what they learn and share it back to the community making us all better.

I genuinely believe that bringing powerful tooling into your creative workflow will make you a happier developer. My goal is helping developers remove some of the friction that prevents debugging, critiquing, and fixing websites viewed on mobile. If you’re responsible for building modern websites and have a keen interest in mastering your craft, I encourage you to attend the BigDesign conference on September 4-6 in Addison, Texas. When you’re there, please stop by my talk and say hello. Let’s do something awesome together!

Ken Tabor is a veteran programmer with years of experience developing websites, mobile apps and video games. He shares his enthusiasm for technology as a writer, teacher and frequent speaker at conferences including South by Southwest, DevNexus and Big Design. Ken is currently a software engineer at Sabre helping foster a modern developer experience for its API platform. His areas of interest include NodeJS, machine learning, and design thinking. He is the author of "Responsive Web Design Toolkit," published by Focal Press. When Ken isn’t working he’s having an adventure with his daughter. They’re always looking for the best chocolate, books, and coffee in Dallas. He can be reached at kenneth.tabor@sabre.com. Follow him on Twitter, @kentabor.